Orphée (1949) - film review

Orphée is a poet who arouses anger wherever he goes, even though his work is still greatly admired.  At a street café, his most vociferous opponents, a group of young firebrands called the Bacchantes, start a fight.  The brawl ends in the death of Orphée’s younger rival, Cègeste.  A mysterious woman in black, the Princess, orders that Cègeste’s body be placed in her limousine and that Orphée accompany her so that he can testify to what he has seen.  After a long drive, the car arrives at a deserted old house in the country.  Here, Orphée watches in disbelief as the Princess and her henchmen carry the corpse through a mirror.  Awaking a short while later, Orphée is met by the Princess’s chauffeur, Heurtebise, who takes him back home, where his wife Eurydice has been anxiously waiting for him.  Orphée shows little interest in his wife and becomes obsessed with the strange messages emanating from the radio in the Princess’s car.  Each night, the Princess visits Orphée in his sleep and the poet recognises her for what she is: the personification of Death.  Jealous of Orphée’s wife, the Princess arranges for her to meet with a little accident.  Orphée cannot accept Eurydice’s death and so, with Heurtebise’s help, he enters the Underworld, determined to recover her.   The Princess is condemned by her masters for taking Eurydice without their instruction and the dead woman is revived.  Orphée is allowed to return to his world with Eurydice, but is warned that if he should ever look upon his wife’s face, she will be taken from him forever...

In the late 1940s, Jean Cocteau’s morbid preoccupation with his failings as a poet would inspire him to make his most fascinating and darkest film.  Based on the writer’s 1926 play of the same title, Orphée transposes the Greek myth of Orpheus and Euryadice to present day France and returns to the theme of Cocteau’s first film, Le Sang d’un poète (1930) - a poet struggling with his art.  Like the main character in the film (Orphée), Cocteau was having to face up to the fact that he no longer represented the avant-garde and had become part of the establishment.  Times were changing.  A new wave of writers and poets was beginning to emerge, expelling old war horses like Cocteau from the pavement cafés on Paris’s trendy Rive Gauche.  Orphée was born out of Cocteau’s growing awareness of his own mortality and reflects his own doubts over his ability to communicate anything new in an era of burgeoning change.  The divide that we see at the start of the film, represented by the established poet Orphée and his young rival Cégeste, presages the cultural schism that would open up between the generations over the course of the next decade - one manifestation of which would be the clash between the rookie directors of the French New Wave and the seasoned filmmakers of the past.  The events of May 1968 would not be far behind.

One of the reasons why Orphée is such a difficult film to interpret is because of the strange imagery it employs to depict love, mortality and the mystery of creativity.  Much of what we see and hear is specific to the time in which the film was made, so when we watch it today we are probably missing a great deal of its psychological and emotional impact.  The strange messages that Orphée hears on the car radio are the kind of coded messages which were broadcast to Resistance groups during the Second World War.  The masked motorcyclists who carry off the bodies of the dead into the Underworld look eerily like the German police who terrorised France during the Occupation.  When the Princess and Orphée are brought before a tribunal in the Underworld, they resemble suspected Resistance members being probed by German officials.  The Underworld itself is represented by the ruins of the French military academy Saint-Cyr, which was all but laid to waste by Allied bombing in 1944.  It is hard, today, to gauge the power that these associations had when the film was first seen.  In 1949, the Occupation was still pretty much a taboo subject, and this could partly explain why the film was so ill-received on its initial release.  Locked in its little time capsule, Orphée is a film that now feels utterly surreal, totally disconnected from reality, and that is a large part of its charm.

For what is arguably Cocteau’s most personal film, it seems fitting that the two rival poets (each representing a facet of the director himself) should be played by two of the people who were closest to him - Jean Marais and Edouard Dermithe.  Marais had starred in Cocteau’s three preceding features - including the one in which he gave his finest performance, La Belle et la bête (1946) - and considered Cocteau his greatest mentor.  Dermithe was originally employed by Cocteau as a gardener but would fulfil his artistic potential (as an actor and painter) under Cocteau’s tutelage.   It was doubtless Dermithe’s extraordinary physical beauty that first attracted Cocteau to him, as a muse and lover, but he was also the man to whom Cocteau entrusted his artistic legacy, by adopting him as his son and making him his heir.  In Orphée, Marais and Dermithe perfectly represent the old and the young Cocteau - the weary academician desperately seeking inspiration, and the young Turk who sees poetry in everything that surrounds him.  Another fairly substantial figure in Cocteau’s life makes a very brief appearance in the film - Jean-Pierre Melville, to whom he conferred the honour of directing Les Enfants terribles (1950).  The film’s most enigmatic performances are provided by François Périer and María Casares, who play respectively the sympathetic death angel Heurtebise and the ice-cold Death Princess whose haunting visage is one of the most enduring icons of French cinema.  Périer, Casares and Dermithe would be reunited (along with an extraordinary cavalcade of film celebrities) in the film’s virtually impenetrable sequel, Le Testament d’Orphée (1960), Cocteau’s directorial swansong.  

Although the special effects used in the film are ludicrously simple (certainly by today’s standards), they are remarkably effective and succeed in blurring the boundary between reality and fantasy.  The film is of course famous for the scenes in which various characters pass through a seemingly solid mirror (thereby entering the Underworld that is home to the spirits of the dead).  Just as memorable are the sequences in which Orphée and Heurtebise traverse the empty wastes of the Underworld, negotiating a twisted geometry that would have confounded even M.C. Escher.  Nicolas Hayer’s double-edged cinematography emphasises the duality that is central to the film and its main protagonist - sunny impressionism and dark expressionism serve to define the character of the two worlds either side of the mirror, the realms of the living and the dead.  Orphée is such a visually striking film that it is easy to overlook the subtle lyricism of Cocteau’s dialogue, but heed carefully and you may just discern the film’s heartbeat - the whispering anguish of the poet as he forages in the dream clouds of the imagination for the tiniest sliver of truth.  A haunting meditation on mortality and the limitations of the artist, Orphée is assuredly Jean Cocteau’s greatest film and remains one of the most profound and unsettling pieces of cinematic art - an unforgettable journey into darkness.

© James Travers 2011

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I loved this move. A fresh, original take on the Greek myth of Orpheus and the Underworld. The masterstroke at the end, death falling in love with the poet and sacrificing herself for him, was superb. A visually fabulous movie, a stunning cast, brilliant dialogue, full of intellectual questioning... what more can you desire?
Frank Gelli (London, England) 

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